ZinZen®

Local-first collaboration without accounts: work stays on your devices and in the groups you join, until you choose to share something outward.

An active proof of concept. Sync, Things, chat, and pairing already work end-to-end for people trying it; it is not a finished product and should not be treated as one.

Federated Resource Planning

Federated Resource Planning (FRP) is the next step beyond ERP. Instead of centralizing data, FRP lets people and organizations keep information local, work offline, and share only what they choose. The result is privacy-preserving coordination across independent organizations, enabling resilient supply chains, marketplaces, and ecosystems without a central platform. This infographic shows how it works.

Who this is aimed at

Local communities and coops. Shared work with clear collection boundaries: orders, bookings, listings, roles — without forcing everyone onto one vendor platform.

Grassroots and commons-minded groups. Self-hostable pieces, COMMONS licensing (inspectable and usable by individual humans under that license — not an open-source or free-software grant), and a path toward open standards and shared public data without giving up device ownership.

Developers. Tauri desktop + Android, Rust event store and sync, TypeScript UI, Axum relay, optional definition registry and Garage-backed public datasets. Architecture decisions are written as ADRs. Expect a PoC, not a polished SDK. Design notes live on Codeberg; the app PoC is ZinZen-PoC-2026.

People who want no AI in the loop. Core collaboration — app, sync, definitions — is specified to work without AI. Optional Studio co-authoring, if used at all, runs with your model endpoint or API key; there is no ZinZen®-hosted “generate for me” as the default, and an AI-free product line is an explicit goal.

You and your devices

Each app install is a sync endpoint. People you know appear under local names you choose — not a global identity provider. You can use several devices; they catch up with each other through a relay when online, and keep working when they are not.

ThingCollections

A ThingCollection is a lived workspace, not a folder: farm coop, local marketplace, equipment share, household, project team. You wear a different role in each. Hierarchical Things, chat, activity, photos, and workflows sit inside that collection. Activity answers “what needs attention?” across the collections you belong to, without dumping every group into one public feed.

Your data stays with you

The design follows local-first ideals: work against data on the device, multi-device sync, offline read/write. There is no requirement for a ZinZen® login or a canonical world identity. A relay helps installs exchange what they are allowed to share within a collection; it is not meant to become the permanent warehouse of your private history.

Sharing out of a collection is deliberate. Public discovery uses redacted catalog rows on a separate public dataplane — not a dump of private sync history. Finding someone in public does not drop them into your home collection; contact opens a thin coordination space first. Independent groups can publish carefully chosen facts so others can see patterns no single collection holds alone — supply, prices, availability, partners — only if primary data stays on devices and public bytes are never backfilled from private relay history.

You own your data.
You control what is shared.
Together, a bigger picture becomes possible.

Inspiration

The concept is inspired, among other sources, by Valueflows — a vocabulary for coordinating the creation, distribution, and exchange of economic resources across distributed networks.

Definitions and workflows

Collections can adopt versioned Thing definitions and FlowGuides. Studio aims at domain authors with progressive disclosure. A visual language for everyday workflow editing (inspired by the Workflow Patterns catalog) is a design direction — not a finished product feature yet. App UI catalogs cover English and Dutch; accessibility targets WCAG 2.2 AA for the shared web UI (not fully claimed yet).

Try it and talk

Build and run the consumer app from codeberg.org/tijlleenders/ZinZen-PoC-2026 (desktop via Tauri; Android sideload). The hosted PoC relay is at relay.zinzen.me. This about site does not distribute installers.

Feedback is very welcome — questions, rough edges, ideas, or anything else. Contact me by email, Signal, Matrix, or Mastodon.